New Disk Manager for Windows (in development)

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By tcm1998

Expert (120)

tcm1998's picture

11-03-2017, 17:01

Since I already mentioned it in another thread here, I thought I'd better announce it properly in a new thread.

I'm working on a new Disk Manager (called MSX Disk Explorer) for windows. For the moment I'm developing in 32 bit, but it'll probably also get it's 64 bit version. At the moment it's more or less an empty shell capable of reading the files of a normal DSK image, but I only started the work a couple of days ago and a lot of that went into trrying to get the user interface to behave the way I want. Features that it will DEFINATELY have in the near future are ..

- Extracting Files (all at once, without having to confirm every single one).
- Multi Disk Support (multiple DSK images stitched together)
- Reading and writing back DMK protected disks
- Simple viewers for Basic, Graphics, Text and HexDump (BASIC already works for 99%)
- Working with many disks at the time (atleast 10)
- Moving or copying files between disks
- Dividing files between mutliple disks
- IPS and MIA patching and creating patches
- DOS2 subdirectories
- Harddisk Support
- Full command line support

Features I'd like to have in there are ...

- DPI Support (converting between DMK and DPI where possible)
- Disassembly viewer

But I'm always open for further suggestions and wishes.

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By tfh

Prophet (3346)

tfh's picture

11-03-2017, 17:36

Nice. That would be a very welcome upgrade to the current DiskManager from Lex which I am still using.
Looking forward to the release Smile

By Louthrax

Prophet (2465)

Louthrax's picture

11-03-2017, 18:09

Nice & ambitious project Smile Maybe you could have the viewers as external applications, to keep your main code simpler (and just launch the extracted BASIC / GFX / Text etc... with these apps). Also these apps could be used invididually.
By the way will your project be Windows or Mac (or Linux) ?

By ren

Paragon (1934)

ren's picture

11-03-2017, 18:25

@Louthrax: see topic title.. Wink Though Linux/*nix support would be nice..(!) (Though Wine might run it otherwise..)

By tcm1998

Expert (120)

tcm1998's picture

11-03-2017, 18:45

Louthrax wrote:

Nice & ambitious project Smile Maybe you could have the viewers as external applications, to keep your main code simpler (and just launch the extracted BASIC / GFX / Text etc... with these apps). Also these apps could be used invididually.
By the way will your project be Windows or Mac (or Linux) ?

I could make it seperate utils indeed, but they really simple viewer to help determine what the .... is on the diskimage. E.g. Gfx can already be viewer quite good by msx viewer or view msx. And also to read and even edit basic there are already some tools (even with japanese font support). So the usefullness to split them up can be debated.

As for the OS, yes, it's windows only, because I'm developing in C#

By NYYRIKKI

Enlighted (6067)

NYYRIKKI's picture

11-03-2017, 21:45

Now that you mentioned DMK and all... We still have absolutely not a single tool to put (or take) files from SVI disks for any existing platform... I know this might not be very interesting to you, but since you are working on this kind of project I thought it might not hurt to ask. Smile

By tcm1998

Expert (120)

tcm1998's picture

12-03-2017, 07:38

NYYRIKKI wrote:

Now that you mentioned DMK and all... We still have absolutely not a single tool to put (or take) files from SVI disks for any existing platform... I know this might not be very interesting to you, but since you are working on this kind of project I thought it might not hurt to ask. Smile

Do you mean SVI disk images? If so, is the format known? I don't think reading/writing low level on a real diskdrive is even allowed in windows.

By NYYRIKKI

Enlighted (6067)

NYYRIKKI's picture

12-03-2017, 08:19

tcm1998 wrote:
NYYRIKKI wrote:

Now that you mentioned DMK and all... We still have absolutely not a single tool to put (or take) files from SVI disks for any existing platform... I know this might not be very interesting to you, but since you are working on this kind of project I thought it might not hurt to ask. Smile

Do you mean SVI disk images?

Yes I did, sorry I was not quite clear here.

Quote:

If so, is the format known?

Yes, but it is quite a bit different & much more simple than FAT12.

Quote:

I don't think reading/writing low level on a real diskdrive is even allowed in windows.

I don't think "allowed" is quite correct word here... AFAIK PC disk controllers simply can't do FM-encoding that is used on SVI disk track 0, side 0. Only way for me to transfer disk images to real disks is to copy the images to DD-disk and then use SVI to transfer them to native SVI disks... Not very handy, but that is the situation at the moment. I have some distant plans to fix this by using more modern storage devices some day, but let's see...

By Louthrax

Prophet (2465)

Louthrax's picture

12-03-2017, 13:17

ren wrote:

@Louthrax: see topic title.. Wink

Darn!

ren wrote:

Though Linux/*nix support would be nice..(!) (Though Wine might run it otherwise..)

Isn't C# also working on Linuxes (not saying that would be easy...) ?

By Louthrax

Prophet (2465)

Louthrax's picture

12-03-2017, 13:21

tcm1998 wrote:

Do you mean SVI disk images? If so, is the format known? I don't think reading/writing low level on a real diskdrive is even allowed in windows.

Check that little card here:
http://www.cbmstuff.com/proddetail.php?prod=scp
I have one on my PC, you can virtually copy/write/store image of any disk with that from Windows. This is making a physical copy of the flux stored on the disk (a single disk image can take something like 20MB!). Not sure if DMK is natively supported but a conversion tool could be done if that's not the case.

By Manuel

Ascended (19466)

Manuel's picture

12-03-2017, 13:58

See http://www.softpres.org/?id=ticket&op=view&tid=01118&code=Tq...
But I haven't heard anything much after that.

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